“Are We Losing Our Democracy?” asks the headline of the October 31, 2025 New York Times editorial. We might as well apply the same question to nearly a quarter of the world’s countries. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report points toward that 25% of nations currently experiencing “democratic backsliding,” when a country undergoes a gradual erosion of its democratic values and progressively exhibits signs of authoritarianism. Concurrently, according to a 2025 Cornell University study conducted by Rachel Beatty Riedl et al., recent scholarly discourse has increasingly directed its attention from democratization to democratic regression.
However, as much as threats to freedom of speech and rising poverty rates necessitate the rigorous investigation of democratic backsliding, it is equally important to examine authoritarian countries’ past signs of democracy. While democracy has various definitions—the United Nations (UN), for example, characterizes a democracy as a society with fair elections, respect for human rights, and freedom of expression—I also define democratic societies as ones in which the population has the ability to defend whatever rights it has. By observing how people protect their freedoms and resist government control in places of tight regulation, we can gain unique insights into how authoritarianism can be challenged by the very people it aims to dominate. In the following paragraphs, I use North Korea—one such authoritarian country that has witnessed quiet indications of democracy—as a case study.
Subtle signs of democracy in North Korea teach us that combating authoritarianism requires not only the effort of people from within but also assistance from other, usually more democratic countries. In North Korea, the state controls all forms of media, forbids people from leaving the country, and ferociously upholds a cult of personality around the Kim family. Yet even in one of the most textbook-authoritarian countries in the world, hints of democracy are undoubtedly present—particularly in the form of widespread disillusionment with the government caused by the circulation of foreign information.
Despite relentless nationwide indoctrination, many North Koreans are aware of the government’s shortcomings thanks to illegal foreign media—films, radio broadcasts, and movies that directly challenge government propaganda—that have been smuggled into the country from China, South Korea, and elsewhere since the mid-1990s, when the combined effect of a devastating famine and the government’s indifference toward its starving citizens led people to engage in illegal trade often involving foreign entrepreneurs. As reported by NK News, a South Korean government poll of more than 6,000 North Korean escapees revealed that over 83% of respondents who’d defected from North Korea between 2016 and 2020 had consumed foreign content while living there.
Despite the narrative, propagated by state media, of foreign lands fraught with crumbling houses and impoverished families, North Korean defector Danbi Kim reflected that continually consuming foreign content has led many North Koreans to “know for sure” the relative affluence of foreigners. For decades, centralized information helped North Korea keep its political system aloft, isolating its citizens from the rest of the world to ensure that their loyalties lay with the government. Nowadays, however, the North Korean people’s shifting, albeit hidden, opinions on the regime are causing people to treat the government’s justifications for its tight control less and less seriously (“let’s wipe out the US imperialist invaders forever!” and similar propaganda slogans are commonly found in state media), posing a quiet but growing threat to the regime’s authoritarian structures.
At the end of the day, North Korea teaches us the indispensable need for foreign countries to assist residents of authoritarian states in combating authoritarianism. If foreign entrepreneurs hadn’t sold foreign media to North Korean traders in the mid-1990s, North Korea might still consist of a population predominantly unaware of the outside realm. When authoritarianism prevents people from exercising their rights, foreign leaders and citizens should utilize their ability to enjoy their freedoms to work toward changing the narrative for those lacking those powers. After the European Union (EU) withheld billions of euros from Hungary due to its democratic backsliding under authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, promising to revert that freeze became central to the political campaign of Peter Magyar, Orbán’s pro-democratic reform opposition leader who just last Sunday ended Orbán’s sixteen-year reign by successfully being elected as new prime minister.
North Korea and Hungary aren’t the only case studies through which we can gain important insights. We can examine various other authoritarian regimes with a similar approach: anti-government protests in Russia, Turkey, and Iran provide only a few additional examples. In a time of rampant democratic backsliding, we must not focus solely on how democracies are weakening—it is imperative that we observe how democracy survives in countries already deep in the throes of authoritarianism, and especially how outside allies can help, for our futures might depend on the lessons we extract.